The textile workers called it "Monday morning disease." They'd feel fine on the weekend, but when they got back to work, they couldn't breathe.

Doctors called it byssinosis, or brown lung, a crippling - and deadly - disease caused by exposure to cotton dust.

In 1980, the Observer ran a series of stories called "Brown Lung: A Case Of Deadly Neglect." It detailed the harm that brown lung did to textile workers in both Carolinas. It exposed the failure of the mills, and of state regulators, to protect millworkers. And it won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

It was one of the Observer's proudest moments. Here's how it came together:

It started the way a lot of stories start - one reporter, looking through a stack of files. The reporter was Howard Covington, who worked for the Observer out of Raleigh. In the summer of 1979, he was interested in doing a project on worker's compensation cases, which were handled through the N.C. Industrial Commission. He'd heard a lot of the cases were related to brown lung. He decided to dig deeper.

Worker's comp cases were public record, but you had to ask for a specific case. Covington had a source inside the Industrial Commission who helped him. He also discovered that federal inspectors in the late '70s had interviewed millworkers. Their names were in the inspection reports. Covington went to the worker's comp files to see if any of those people had filed claims. He found hundreds. And what he found convinced him he was onto a big story.

Back then, the textile business was the dominant industry in the area - more than 391,000 people worked in Carolinas textile mills. It would take detailed and careful work to do the story right. The newsroom, under Editor Rich Oppel and Managing Editor Mark Ethridge, assembled a team.

Investigative reporter Marion Ellis interviewed millworkers. Medical reporter Robert Conn explored the disease. Reporter Bob Drogin investigated mills in South Carolina. In all, 15 journalists played major roles. Projects Editor Laura King (now Laura Sessions Stepp) was in charge of pulling it all together.

"If we messed up, they (mill owners) would come down on us like crazy," said Stepp, who later worked for the Washington Post and has written two books. "This is a difficult topic and takes a lot of thought. ... It was the most exciting period of my life."

The brown-lung team worked through the fall and into winter. Drogin, now a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, remembers touring S.C. mills where the working conditions hadn't changed in decades: "In a way, the mill towns themselves were sort of invisible. Nobody had really looked at them before."

The series ran over eight days, starting on a Sunday - Feb. 3, 1980 - and ending on the next. What did the brown-lung team find?

Even though 18,000 Carolinians suffered from brown lung, only 320 had received worker's comp.

Many mills paid little or nothing to affected workers, fought higher safety standards - and some argued that brown lung didn't even exist.

Doctors who worked for the mills dismissed or downplayed brown-lung claims.

State agencies delayed cases for months and years, sometimes until workers had died.

Inspectors didn't check the mills enough and gave them routine extensions to clean up.

The main story featured Landrum Clary, a Lowell man who had worked in the mills for 38 years. The company he worked for had discovered his breathing problems in 1968, but kept him working in the cotton dust until 1971, when he started passing out at work. Doctors diagnosed brown lung. At the time of the story he was tethered to an oxygen machine. "Sometimes I just don't care if I live or not," he said.

The series won a slew of state and national awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Award for reporting on the plight of the disadvantaged. Several people on the team have one of the busts of RFK that were given out as part of the award. One sits in the office of the Observer's current editor, Rick Thames.

Pulitzer winners often find out a day or two early that they've won - although sometimes they don't know the category. All the Pulitzer awards are special, but the award for public service is meant to symbolize the Pulitzer ideal. The prize is a gold medal.

Oppel told people to hang around the newsroom on the day of the announcement. The call came in, and he jumped on top of a desk.

"It's the gold medal in public service!" he shouted. "We won the big one!"

There was champagne, and later the party moved to the now-departed Rheinland Haus on Park Road. It was a good party. Somebody broke a mirror.

Covington had left by then for a job at a paper in Greensboro. He took his family to celebrate at a Japanese restaurant. A kid heard them talking about the Pulitzer, came over and asked Covington for his autograph.

The Pulitzer announcement was on Monday. Laura Stepp got married that Saturday. It was a big week.

Now, 30 years later, the people who did the story talk about it simply.

"I just wanted to make sure the people got a fair shake," Ellis says.

"That's the role of a newspaper," Stepp says. "To give a voice to people who have no voice."

"These workers were Charlotte Observer readers," Ethridge says. "This was our community. It's nice to be able to feel like you did some good, you know? I mean, that's the whole thing."